They don’t know what they are doing. That’s what President Barack Obama said about U.S. leaders in charge of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. He was giving online speeches at commencement events around the country with discomforting rhetoric, but was nicer than usual. He mentioned no names.

In the pantheon of great lines suitable for induction into Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations” is Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 2010 comment about Obamacare: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

Every few years I write a column about the United States Postal Service. In 2009 I just about wrote it off. That year the Postal Service faced a $7 billion revenue shortfall, and 700 post offices were slated for closure.

For three years former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was put through a legal and financial wringer by top officials within the FBI, including its then-director James Comey. The FBI investigation threatened to destroy Flynn’s career, finances and life, as, according to the New York …

The TV was turned on to a news show and I was fooling around with something else and thought I heard the newscaster say, “Coming up next, the ‘murder hornet,’ now president in the United States for the first time.” I puzzled over it for a minute and realized she had actually said, “now prese…

Even if the sexual assault allegations by former Joe Biden staff member Tara Reade turn out to be false there are still problems the former vice president faces.

Historians will someday puzzle over the head-scratching ironies of the Trump presidency.

Inequality — that’s the foremost issue for so-called progressives these days, and here is what it means in their compassionate souls: not inequality under the law, which would be abhorrent in a just society, but inequality of income. Somehow they seem to think that some people having more mo…

“The Ostrich Alliance.”

The World Health Organization is a Chinese toady. When the coronavirus broke out in China, and after the nation had some time to assess the facts, it did not share them and lied to the U.N. agency. The truth would not serve China’s purposes, and even after the agency itself had been treated …

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced public schools will be closed for the rest of the academic year due to the coronavirus. More mayors and governors will likely make similar announcements, if they have not already done so.

My six-month postpartum checkup got canceled this week.

Back when I taught English courses to college freshmen, occasionally our class discussions would veer toward some of the dangerous challenges that face our globe, such as climate change and nuclear holocaust. These catastrophes were merely hypothetical to my young students, and in some respe…